OAK RIDGE — Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are trying to find a way to clean mercury out of East Tennessee's most contaminated bodies of water.
One such body is East Fork Poplar Creek in Oak Ridge. The river has an industrial past with high levels of mercury.
"We feel that mercury is very important. It's a pollutant of global concern," said Scott Brooks, ORNL's lead distinguished scientist over the project.
Brooks hopes to find a solution in East Tennessee that can be scaled to a global level.
His greatest concern is with methyl mercury, a dangerous form of mercury that increases as it runs up the food chain. That means even in a body of water with safe mercury levels, the fish we eat can have harmful amounts.
Too much methyl mercury can attack a nervous system.
"We feel like we're getting closer all the time but we're not quite at the point where we have the universal solution to mercury contamination in an environment," said Brooks.
Teresa Matthews, a scientist in the aquatic ecology lab, is working on one possible solution. Her team discovered that by lowering mercury levels in a body of water, the levels in the fish would eventually shrink back down to safe levels. She believes one way to do that is by using the natural filtering of mussels and clams. Right now, her team is focused on a few species of mussels.
"They can change the entire ecosystem," said Matthews. "If we get the water below a certain target then we might expect to see our fish drop below risk thresholds."
The research is still in its early stages.
Matthews and her team expect to know more about the possibility of using mussels as a solution to mercury pollution by late 2018.
She and Brooks both believe the mollusks could be a step in the right direction, but are likely only part of a broader solution to mercury contamination.
"It alone is not going to be the solution but it may be an important part of breaking that cycle of turning mercury into methyl mercury," said Brooks.